Monday, April 30, 2007

Ian Burns, founder and managing director of redSTAR Times Media recently sent us some copies of redSTAR magazine. The magazine, which features culture and travel information for Qingdao China, recently switched formats and now features a full spread timeline to show the monthly event calendar!

We are excited that Ian chose Bee Docs' Timeline for the redSTAR event calendar and we are always thrilled to see the creative ways our customers use timelines.

In other customer news: Congratulations to Larry Staton, Jr who is now an official member the Florida Bar!

One of the best parts of running Bee Documents is getting to know all the talented and creative people who use our software. Be sure to drop me a line and introduce yourself if you haven't yet. I'd love to hear from you.

Saturday, April 14, 2007

If you are a Mac fan, you probably heard Apple announce this week that the release of Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X, is being delayed from June until October. Those of you who are Timeline customers may be wondering what this means for the next major release of Timeline ("T2").

The bad news:

T2 is heavily dependent on Leopard technologies at this point, so the release of T2 will also be delayed until October. For me, this means a financial hit. For you, this means you'll have to wait a few more months for features that many of you have requested and to see the cool new stuff that I'm cooking up for you.

The good news:

The more Leopard functionality that I build into T2, the more convinced I am that building it for Leopard was the right thing to do. T2 is going to be a huge leap forward for timeline software and I'm sure both Leopard and T2 will be worth the wait.

A few extra months of development time means that some features that I had slated for point releases will be able to be implemented by the T2 launch.

I've got a handful of important bugs that I've reported to Apple about Leopard that directly impact T2. If delaying the launch of Leopard helps Apple fix these bugs, T2 will directly benefit (so will other apps).

T2 will be a free upgrade to existing customers, so you don't feel like you need to wait until October to purchase Timeline software. If you need to make timelines, go ahead and purchase the existing version which is still great and when T2 and Leopard are ready, you'll be the first to know.

If the iPhone (which is blamed for the Leopard delay) brings more people to the Mac platform, this will be great news for all companies that depend on the Mac, including my own, which would make up for the delay in Leopard.

My biggest fear is that the delay may be a sign that Apple is losing focus on the Mac. But, it is way too early to be able to make any conclusions about whether or not this is happening...

WWDC will be very interesting to watch. If Steve Jobs amazed us with new Leopard features and some insanely great Mac hardware, and if Apple doesn't make a habit of delays like this, then all will be well and I'll just chalk it up to growing pains.